The Story of María and José: Un Cuento de Navidad

I’m going to take Christmas holiday from the blog. In the meantime, I’m re-printing a blog post that I first posted in 2006. I wish you all a happy and healthy holiday season.

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During the holiday season, I like to believe that people are more willing to put aside their differences and see one another as part of the brotherhood of humanity.

In this spirit, I am reproducing a chapter from Enrique Armijo’s M.A. thesis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Enrique’s thesis is based on fieldwork he completed with InglesiaUnida in Chapel Hill. The full citation for the except that follows is: Armijo, Enrique. 2000. Un Pueblo Nuevo: An Ethnography of a Hispanic Protestant Community of Faith. M.A. Thesis in Folklore University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As you read, bear in mind that Armijo presents each of the paragraphs in the original Spanish text first, followed by the English translation.

The Story of María and José: UnCuentodeNavidad

The chapter that follows this conclusion is a reading, written by the youth of IglesiaUnida during a church camp in 1997. It tells of a pregnant Mexican woman named María, her Tijuanan boyfriend José, and their trip to North Carolina to find work and a place to live. As with the stories of many of the congregation members at IglesiaUnida, their journey is an eventful one; along the way their truck breaks down, they stay in a shelter, and they are visited by an angel. Like the other expressions of the church examined in this thesis, the story reveals how local and universal themes form a dialectic that leads to deeper understanding and articulates the informed convergence between life lived and faith felt.

In reading the story, I ask that the reader resist applying a strictly cultural lens of interpretation that can fog the deeper spiritual understandings that an example like this can provide. Like the songs, sermons, prayers, activism, and development discussed earlier in this thesis, the youths’ narrative shows not only how its themes are particular to the context at IglesiaUnida, but also how universal—when informed by the experiences of the members—these themes of spirit, struggle, and redemption truly are.

A young girl named María was engaged to a guy named José. José was originally from Tijuana, but lived in San Diego and had his Green Card. In San Diego there weren’t any jobs, so José (whom his friends called Pepe) decided to come to North Carolina to look for work and a place to live. Since he wasn’t going to be able to run across the border to visit María any more, they decided to find a “coyote,” to get her across the border so she could come to North Carolina as well.

While they were trying to get the money together to pay the “coyote,” an angel appeared to them. The angel told María, “You are blessed, María. You will have a baby, and your son will save the world.”

One day, they were told it was a good time to cross the border. When they were already in route, the car in which they were traveling broke down and they were asked to pay more money to complete the trip. Since they didn’t even have money for gas, they had to wait, sleeping under some trees for several days, until the family could send a little more help. Maria’s pregnancy was already becoming obvious.

At last the help arrived, but when José and María arrived in Chapel Hill, they couldn’t find work or a place to stay. José went out to find work several days, but in some places, “security” wouldn’t even let him in to talk to those in charge of hiring. They had thought they could stay in a park, but the police told them they had to get out. They went to a church, but it was locked; they ended up in the shelter, but they knew they could only stay a few days. María was afraid to tell anybody she was pregnant. She was afraid to go to the hospital, because she didn’t have her papers.

And this is how José and María’s baby was born: they knocked on many doors, because they didn’t want to go to the shelter and get sent to the hospital. They went to Pablo’s house and Mario Alberto’s house and asked other families they knew, but nobody had any room to accommodate them. They spent a couple of nights in restaurants and stores that are open 24 hours, but at last María knew she couldn’t walk any more. It was with great joy that they heard a family who lived in a small trailer had moved the children into the parent’s room and had agreed to let them have the small room. And that is where the baby was born. They padded a drawer with old clothes and made him a little bed there.

When the baby was born, everybody in the area found out. (At least, those who were not too busy with their expensive toys.) Some heard beautiful music that sounded as if angels were singing. Others felt they wanted to go and meet this baby, who was born on the 25th of December, and they took him warm clothes, diapers, and some toys. Many families were happy to see that the baby was healthy, and they were filled with hope, thinking that God was truly present in that humble home. Someone says that you could hear a choir that sang: Glory to God, peace on earth to those who have faith in the Lord!